Du Bois, put it this way: “one ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

In Booker T. Washington it was clear there was a heavy emphasis on the “self” in self-help. But in the integrationist leanings of W.E.B. Du Bois, one can’t help but think the enterprise of being black in a white America was fraught with irreconcilable differences. Du Bois often spoke of the “color line,” which was his characterization of the dichotomy, the stacked relationship in American between black and white.  The existence of intermediate racial steps like the awful-sounding “quadroon” and “octaroon” in the U.S. Census in the 1800’s betrays a stark binary. Nonetheless, the duality Du Bois and other black intellectuals grappled with conjures a Faustian one, where as Goethe’s Faust said: “two souls, alas, are housed within my breast.” It seems to be an implacable duality, one not easily quieted, one not easily realized.

When I think of bothness as it pertains to being mixed Chinese-Western, I imagine lumpy Cream of Wheat. It sounds strange yet the metaphor is clear. Bothness does not mean smoothness.